Featured Scientist - Ron Ray

Ronald Ray (Ron) a Senior
Staff Physicist has been with Fermilab for six years. Ron is currently
responsible for the Teacher Research Associates (TRAC) Program
through Fermilab.

Please describe your position at Fermilab.

I am a Senior Staff Physicist in the Particle Physics Division
at Fermilab. Most staff physicists have "lab jobs" where
they are responsible for helping to make the place run; and research
responsibilities which are largely self-directed. My lab job just
recently became the oversight of the TRAC teacher program. I had
no previous involvement in running the program before this year.
At first I viewed it as a minor annoyance which was going to detract
from my research time, but after talking with some previous TRAC
participants and hearing first-hand how valuable it had been to
them, I became a real supporter of the program. There are so many
reasons why it's important for the public to have a better understanding
of science, and teachers have tremendous leverage because of their
ability to reach a large number of students each year.

Please tell the readers a little more
about your research activities.

My research for the past five years has been centered on the
KTeV experiment. KTeV is a state-of-the-art experiment which is
probing the origins of something known as CP violation, one of
the fundamental mysteries of high energy physics at the moment.
CP violation has been proposed as a possible mechanism for explaining
the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe and
is one of the most important "loose ends" in our overall
understanding of nature. Over the past five years I have been
involved in the design and construction of the detector. We finally
began taking data in the Fall of 1996 and will continue until
September of 1997. Once data taking is complete we will spend
several years analyzing the data.

What do you enjoy most about your position?

My mother once commented that I became a physicist because
it's a job where you can dress like a bum. I'm not sure if that's
exactly true, but there is a certain informality inherent to this
field which I enjoy. The other aspects to the field which I enjoy
are the ability to travel (I've pretty much been around the world
many times over), the constant exposure to interesting people
and ideas and the fact that no two days are ever the same.

Tell us about your experiences before
your position at Fermilab.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine
and spent four years after that at Northwestern University as
a Postdoctoral Research Associate.

This is the typical path which physicists follow before they
obtain permanent positions. As a graduate student, I worked on
an experiment at Fermilab's sister laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland
known as CERN. As a Postdoc at Northwestern, I worked on an experiment
at Fermilab. I helped to build a detector for a new experiment
and supervised several graduate students. This began what has
now been an 11-year association with Fermilab.

What were your undergraduate years like?

I played basketball during my first year in college, but did
little else. It was after this first year that it dawned on me
that there was little chance that I would ever earn a living at
the sport. At that point I got serious about school, but I was
a five-year undergraduate because of that first lost year. I enjoyed
those five years though. Physics was a fun major. I learned a
lot in those few years, mostly just sitting in my room by myself
doing problems. That's how you really learn things.

Please tell me about your exposure to
science and math in school and what sparked your interest in this
type of career.

I had physics when I was a junior in high school and I liked
it. I think a big part of it was that it was difficult but I could
do it. I recall being impressed that I could calculate properties
of simple electronic circuits, build the circuit and then measure
exactly what I had calculated. I had a good physics teacher in
high school. He was not a great teacher, but he was good enough
to not turn me off to the subject and he let people progress at
their own rates.

What advice would you give to students
who want to enter a career in science?

Don't do it unless you really love it. In order to extract
satisfaction from this field you really have to be able to see
the big picture. Much of the day-to-day activities in which you
find yourself involved have little to do with the grand notion
of science that many people have. There have been many days when
I have found myself laying on the floor of our experimental hall
for hours plugging in cables or lifting heavy power supplies.
Without those cables and power supplies there is no experiment,
no data and therefore no science. So you do these things with
the big picture in mind.

Share with us some of your hobbies.

At any given time of the year I'm usually involved in some
sport. I play basketball, volleyball, softball and golf on a regular
basis. Sometimes it is difficult to find the time, but I make
every effort because it's a way of retaining my sanity

What were the responsibilities of some
of the teachers you have worked with at Fermilab?

During the 5 years when we were building the KTeV detector,
we had a number of teachers and summer students who worked with
us over the summer and contributed in various ways. We had a teacher
who worked on our laser calibration system where we use a laser
to distribute light through optical fibers to various detector
elements for calibration purposes. He setup much of the hardware
and wrote software to control the laser and some filter wheels.
We had another teacher who spent a summer writing software for
our digital pipeline, an important component necessary to read
out data from our detector. We currently have a teacher who monitors
the quality of the data coming from the detector everyday and
alerts us to problems. The way in which teachers contribute depends
on their particular skills and our particular needs at any given
time.